[Thinkpad] Batteries - what is normal and how to handle

Hello together,

I bought an IBM T41 these days. After loading the battery, discharching
to 0% (some 100 mAh left) and up to 100%, /proc/acpi/battery/... told
me, that only 90% or the design capacity is left. Is this normal for a
brand new battery? Or are there known problems, e.g. wrong capacity
information?

Second question:

Before the IBM I had a Toshiba book. After over 2 years the batteries
had lost about 2/3 of their design capacity (according to
/proc/acpi/..). But, it looked like the batteries itself _calculate_
their capacity, not measure it. So it was possible to for an hour with
about 4% on the batteries. Hoping to recalibrate the electronic I let
the notebook run till it everything went out. (no automatic shutdown as
Windoze does, really till the voltage droped) Of course, I immediately
plugged the external source in. Sometimes it helped a bit.

Does anyone have experiences, if this might be harmful to the batteries
or if it is really as helpful as someone told me .. ?

TIA
Daniel Winkler
_______________________________________________
Thinkpad mailing list
Thinkpad@stderr.org
http://stderr.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/thinkpad
Received on Wed Jun 2 12:55:42 2004